When the British bumped Shepherd’s Pie off the school dinner menu* a decade ago, it heralded a wave of terror over the mysterious rise of mad cow disease (aka bovine spongiform encephalopathy) a cattle ailment caused by rogue proteins called prions that ate holes in the cows’ brains and later killed them. In March 1996, these fears proved justified when it was revealed that ten young people had been diagnosed with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, (vCJD) a novel form of the sponge-brained disease likely transmitted to humans via infected beef. Since then, 158 people have died of vCJD in the United Kingdom, and a handful elsewhere. Four-and-a-half million cattle were slaughtered in Britain, 200,000 of which showed the typical tremors of the disease. But whoever heard their side of the story? In The Mad Cow Talks Back, poet Jo Shapcott gives the stolid, stoic beast a chance to state its case.
The Mad Cow Talks Back
By Jo Shapcott
I’m not mad. It just seems that way
because I stagger and get a bit irritable.
There are wonderful holes in my brain
through which ideas from outside can travel
at top speed and through which voices,
sometimes whole people, speak to me
about the universe. Most brains are too
compressed. You need this spongy
generosity to let the others in.
I love the staggers. Suddenly the surface
of the world is ice and I’m a magnificent
skater turning and spinning across whole hard
Pacifics and Atlantics. It’s risky when
you’re good, so of course the legs go before,
behind, and to the side of the body from time
to time, and then there’s the general embarrassing
collapse, but when that happens it’s glorious
because it’s always when you’re travelling
most furiously in your mind. My brain’s like
the hive: constant little murmers from its cells
saying this is the way, this is the way to go.
Note: Jo Shapcott is a British poet who teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, London. Her books of poetry include Electroplating the Baby (1988) whose title poem explains the chemical process of embalming an infant, Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998). As Shapcott explains on her web site, the term "mad cow," signals an explicit feminist message, as the phrase is also a standard male chauvinist insult. The Mad Cow Talks Back appears in Shapcott’s collection Her Book: Poems 1988-1998; it is reprinted here with kind permission of Faber & Faber.
*Personally, I can only say good riddance: I only have to smell this mashed-potato-and-minced-beef mess to be instantly transported back to the clatter of my primary school’s dining hall, where it was served regularly and alternately with equally unappetizing platefuls of gloppy, gristle-filled goulash. Banish the memory! Now, try this recipe for vegan Shepherd’s Pie.
